You Can Only Juggle a Finite Number of Objects
I have been freed my bondage. No longer will I deliver pizzas on the weekend. I gave my supervisor my two-week notice last weekend. She wrote on the calendar that I would work the next two weeks. I steeled myself for the next two weeks and continued my work. Yesterday, I stopped by the store to check the schedule and my boss told me that I was taken care of. When i asked for clarification, she informed me I was free. I simply needed to stop by in a week and pick up my last check. She also requested that I stop by from time to time to say hello.
This week’s events are a culmination of a year of praying. I started at Fielder Road in August of last year and for a few weeks I worked over 50 hours between both places. That forced me to cut back my hours to just Friday and Saturday at Pizza Hut. If it had not been for my financial situation, I would have left Pizza Hut then. As the months passed, I resigned myself to working both jobs. As this summer drew to a close, I began to look at my financial situation again. If I cut back in a few areas I could afford to work only one job. But I still debated it. I enjoyed the people I worked with. I also felt that I wanted to quit for only selfish reasons. Then the semester began, and I got a clearer understanding of the workload. With classes and work there was no time for homework let alone a social life. That is when the paradigm changed. Previously, I had wanted to quit for convenience and comfort. Now I needed to quit in order to fulfill my class requirements.
After I gave my boss the news, I began to have questions. “Was I doing the right thing?” “Am I leaving behind a ministry that God placed me in?” I knew I needed to quit but I could not shake those nagging questions. The questions continued until last Saturday night. My shift was drawing to a close and there was a plethora of jobs needing to be done: wash dishes, fold boxes, prepare chicken wings, cut pizzas, and answer the phone. I froze for a moment, attempting to make a decision. Each task was important and needed to be done, but I could only do one at a time. It was in that moment that the Lord gave me clarity and a peace about my decision.
Just as with all the tasks at Pizza Hut, I have many tasks that I can do and are all good. However, I can only do so many. Since I moved to Texas to go to seminary, that task ranks near the top. I have one job that can pay the bills and another that would have left me lacking financially. I chose the job that would not bankrupt me. This doesn’t mean that I won’t miss the people and the extra money, but sometimes life requires tough choices. And you can only juggle so many things before things get dropped.
Enabling bad behavior through pizza delivery
After delivering pizzas for well over a year, you learn to recognize houses and customers. You remember the houses that tip well and the ones that are problems. Then there are the houses that make your skin crawl. Not because of poverty or weird occurrences. No, I’m talking about the houses of those who are border-line morbidly obese. I have nothing against the obese. I am not a specimen of physical fitness myself. I have struggled with my weight since the 3rd grade. I do not like delivering to these houses because I feel like I am enabling their behavior in some way.
One customer comes to mind. Every time I pull up to his house, I feel this uneasy feeling come over me. As I look at the receipt to verify I have the correct address and all the items, I see the number. The number on every delivery receipt stating how many times someone has ordered from Pizza Hut. I do not know by how much it has grown since I was last here but it has increased. He answers the door wearing clothes that have been modified to fit him. He is nice and tips well. But as I leave, I just cannot shake that feeling.
As I think about this, we are all in the same boat. We may not be obese but we each have behaviors that we continue to indulge despite their negative impact upon our lives. And why do we continue in these behaviors? It may be out of fear. We turn to these behaviors to comfort us in times of stress. Other times it is loneliness or depression. So we turn to these behaviors to numb ourselves or to help us forget. But the fear and loneliness will return. The answer is obvious but so often we ignore it, the Spirit of the Living God.
For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead; who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope. And He will yet deliver us … Now He who establishes us with you in Christ and anointed us, is God, who also sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge.
2 Corinthians 1:8-10, 21-22
Day in the Life of a Pizza Delivery Guy – Part 2
This Friday morning began like most any other Friday morning, an epic battle of wills. Will I lie in bed until 30 minutes before I need to be at work or will I get up early and be productive? There is a reason sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.
What can I say about delivering pizzas? You cut the pizza, put it in a box, then in a bag and you deliver it. Rinse and repeat for 8 hours. I did notice some things about some of the new personnel that have begun working at our store in the past month. In the past, if a manager needed me to stay past my scheduled time, they would ask nicely. If I said no, they accepted it and let me go. However, the shift manager I had tonight tried to guilt trip me. She told me that both of the orders she was giving me were late. I told her I would stay. I had already stayed 30 minutes past time because our general manager had asked me to stay. I was trying to get away to get to a friend’s going away party.
So anyway, I got my orders and began driving to the first house. I looked at the ticket. This order was not late. The second order had 20 minutes left. At this point, I was aggravated. If this manager had asked me nicely and not tried to guilt me, I would not have had a problem with it. However, she stretched the truth to make me stay. I got both of the orders to the correct houses before the promised delivery time. I was expecting pizzas that were 30 minutes past their promised time.
One ritual we have as drivers is that once we have cashed out for the evening, we complete some task for the manager to lighten the load for the drivers that will be closing. I have no problem with this. I will wash some dishes or take out the trash, no big deal. But, when a manager has asked me to stay over an hour past my scheduled times as a thank you, they should just let me go after I cash out. That was not the case tonight. I got back and had to fold boxes before I could go home.
This is probably just because this manager does not know me and I do not know her. One of my last manager’s would try and guilt me by giving me sad puppy dog eyes but she also understood that I was tired after eight hours and just wanted to go home. Maybe as I get to know this new manager better, things will work better.
Two sides to each coin
So I started my new job this past week. However this job now puts me in a situation. There is the part of me that would like to get more hours and quit my job at Pizza Hut. So side one. I wouldn’t have to work as much and the job doesn’t require me to stand for hours on end or spend all night driving around.
But if I quit my job at Pizza Hut then I will have effectively isolated myself to live in my Christian bubble. Despite my desire for comfort and to take the easy way out, I know God has placed me at Pizza Hut for a reason. There are hurting people that need hope. So despite what I want I know I need to keep my job at Pizza Hut.
So my prayer is that my friendships at Pizza Hut would deepen and allow me the opportunity to share with them what Christ has done in my life and what He can do in theirs.
